Recent News Releases

A new simple tool developed by nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego, is opening the door to an era when anyone will be able to build sensors, anywhere, including physicians in the clinic, patients in their home and soldiers in the field. The team from the University of California, San Diego, developed high-tech bio-inks that react with several chemicals, including glucose. They filled off-the-shelf ballpoint pens with the inks and were able to draw sensors to measure glucose directly on the skin and sensors to measure pollution on leaves. Full Story

Three engineers at the University of California, San Diego, are being honored by the Arthur P. Sloan Foundation with Sloan Research Fellowships for 2015. This year’s recipients are computer scientist Shachar Lovett, Padmini Rangamani, from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and nanoengineer Andrea Tao.The fellowships seek to boost fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise. The two-year awards go to 126 researchers yearly in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field."Their achievements and potential place them among the next generation of scientific leaders in the U.S. and Canada," noted the Foundation in a full-page New York Times advertisement, adding that since 1955, "Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win 43 Nobel Prizes, 16 Fields Medal, 65 National Medals of Science" and numerous other honors.Full Story

Nikolai Deveraux earned a bachelor’s in computer science at the Jacobs School in 2001. Now an engineering project manager for ViaSat, he often comes back to campus. One of his favorite campus events is Research Expo, which showcases posters from more than 200 Ph.D. students from the Jacobs School’s six departments, as well as faculty talks. “It’s good for me, both personally and professionally,” Deveraux said. “It’s good for my company. And it’s fun.” We asked him what keeps him coming back.Full Story

Professors leading four new research centers at the University of California, San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering will speak at Research Expo on April 16, 2015. The faculty talks will focus on cutting-edge research in wearable sensors, extreme events research, sustainable power and energy, and visual computing. Full Story

How do you build the perfect water filter? With cotton balls or coffee filters? How about sand? And how about decorations: feathers or duct tape? These were the questions groups of girls energetically debated on a warm Thursday afternoon in December at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School in Encinitas. It was all part of a girls-only after school program led by undergraduate students at the University of California, San Diego, and funded by a three-year $800,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. The project is called SISTERS, short for Sustaining Interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Research in Society, and it reaches more than 130 girls in 5th- and 6th grade at four Encinitas elementary schools, with anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the students live below the poverty line. “We want this program to make a profound and lasting difference in these girls’ lives,” said Mandy Bratton, SISTERS’ principal investigator. “We hope the engaging curriculum and the interaction with female scientists, engineers and undergraduates will ignite their interest in careers in science and engineering in which women continue to be underrepresented.”Full Story

They learned about building circuits with blinking LED lights. They learned several (programming) languages. They also earned badges. Dozen of eager Boy Scouts turned out at this year’s IEEE STEM Merit Badge Fair Saturday Jan. 31 on the UC San Diego campus to add some technical skills to their resume—and a few badges to their sash. Full Story

After using optical tweezers to squeeze a tiny bead attached to the outside of a human stem cell, researchers now know how mechanical forces can trigger a key signaling pathway in the cells. The squeeze helps to release calcium ions stored inside the cells and opens up channels in the cell membrane that allow the ions to flow into the cells, according to the study led by University of California, San Diego bioengineer Yingxiao Wang. Full Story

The governing board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) has awarded two University of California, San Diego researchers almost $3 million in combined funding to pursue new technologies intended to accelerate advances moving stem cell therapies out of the lab and into the clinic.Full Story